English Art/Literary General / Conversation / Greetings / Letters

"It got bad after you went to Oxford and stopped coming to the hotel I was getting like one of these battered wives you read about in the papers these days only I wasn't a wife. And he started coming to the hotel and carrying on many a time I thought I was for the sack. But then one day somebody came to the hotel. A tall man in a tweed jacket and the second time he talked to me with his level steady gaze I felt he had been sent by God himself..."

The text is from a British autobiographical novel where the author quotes a letter from an old acquaintance he hasn't heard of since 30 years. The writer of the letter - a woman managing a boarding house - is talking of the days after the author left her "hotel". She had a rough lover in those days - post-war London, in 1950 -, a man who usually didn't come to the place: the woman used to see her outside the boarding house. The tall man in the tweed jacket apparently saves her from her old life, they marry and move elsewhere...

The language of the letter is, unlike the rest of the book, not proper but still understandable, and I assume that the "for the sack" part must be a kind of saying, which I couldn't find out